Incidence of Ebola virus disease to reach its peak in December

MOSCOW, October 15. /TASS/. Forecasts suggest the peak of incidence of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in West Africa will likely fall on December, Dr. Viktor Maleyev, a deputy director of Russia’s Central Research Institute of Epidemiology told TASS on Wednesday.

Dr. Maleyev and a group of his staff-members have worked in Guinea under the auspices of the WHO in the framework of Russia’s assistance to West-African countries.

“It’s now rolling towards the peak, which I think will come about in December but we don’t know when the peak period might end,” he said. “The epidemic is spreading at fast enough as more than 200 people contact the disease daily.

Dr. Maleyev said along with it that assessments of statistical data are highly problematic in the current situation.

“For instance, children younger than 5 years old are not officially registered in Guinea and that’s why a child of this kind will not be reflected in statistics in any way if he falls ill,” he said.

One of the explanations for this extremely sharp surge of the disease has occurred is that the felling of forests and replacement them with fruit trees has pushed up the populations of bats that feed on fruit and the bats are one of the main carriers of the EVD.

The first case of Ebola that triggered the current epidemic occurred in December 2013. “A month passed before the Ebola virus was diagnosed,” Dr. Maleyev said.

Mass cases of contacting the disease were first reported in March.

The World Health Organization says the current outbreak of the EVD has claimed the lives of more than 4,000 people in West Africa and another 8,000 are being infected. The majority of lethal outcomes is registered in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.